Christine de Beer - effortless floral craftsman
Leaf snippet gift cube
- 25 December 2013
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It is not easy to find a place that can recycle polystyrene or Styrofoam, mostly because it is almost impossible to re-make it into high quality polystyrene. But it is really easy to find uses for the sheets you receive as packaging. Don't trash it. Re-purpose it!
You can either pin or glue the plant material to the Styrofoam shape. Pinning is best if you want to re-use the shape.
Styrofoam is also ideal if you want the design to float on water.
Cut a gift cube shape from Styrofoam
It doesnt need to be exact any off-cut will do
Cut the leaf snippets.
Glue the leaf snippets to the Styrofoam cube.
Smooth down each snippet to create a neat flat coverage
Create a random pattern by overlapping the snippets to ensure the cube will still be neatly covered once the leaf snippets dry
Simply work over any imperfections in the Styrofoam cube
Make sure you generously overlap the edges, the leaf snippets will shrink as it dries and no Styrofoam should show
Gift cube done and ready to design with
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Tutorials
The finish of every design should be flawless. Make sure there are no bits of glue visible in your design by carefully removing all traces of spills.
Polystyrene or Styrofoam makers ideal shapes to pin or glue plant material to.
Creating a good quality armature makes it effortless for you to replace flowers, as they fade, with fresh blooms for an ever changing and long lasting floral design.
Fast and easy way to create a base to rest a few vases or bottles on.
I wanted my beads to softly float above my snowball posy. If I glued the beads to some of the flowers it would just disappear in the mass of twigs and flowers.
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